Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Jambavaan - A treatise on the modern day relevance of the great Indian epics

Written on the lines of some VV reviews. (No i am not yet out of the VV hating phase. it will take Perarasu to get me out of that).

Believe it or not, this movie has been made for one and only one person. T.N Seshagopalan.Seshu, as he is affectionally called in his family circles has come up with one more stellar performance after the stupendous success in his first movie - "Thodi Raagam". Do you remember the chart topper of the 1980s...?

"Thodiyil PaadugindrenOdi nee Varuvaai Murugaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

- sung in Thodi Raagam and set to Roopaka Thalam

Seshu plays a famous carnatic singer in this movie too and carries the movie completely on his capable shoulders. His body language, facial expressions, vocal intonation and general aura give life to an erstwhile ordinary movie. His first appearance in a sillhuette where he intones about good and evil... whoa... unforgettable words. he starts out with a hymn, Shantakaram... in praise of lord Vishnu (actually... Lord Thiagarajan),for having made Prashanth.He then goes onto the Bhagavad Gita... with his stentorian recital of "yada yada hi dharmasya", he makes the metaphysical connect between Ramayana and Mahabharatha and primes the reason to for Jambhavan to start on a war path against evil.

Seshu's bewildered expression (like what a monkey would have after eating some wasabi) when Prashant talks about his love for the Reddy girl to him, and his one liner in reponse... ('mmmmm')emphasises Seshu's penchant for underplay. Marlon Brando would have taken time off from his current eating binge in hell to wipe his mouth and then deliver an epithet about hawaiian dogs. (or hot dogs.. if you actually get the SNL connect).

Seshu,(from now on referred to as Brando... if you may) gets the correct opportunity to exhibit his overt histrionic ability (the other end of the spectrum) when his entire family dies in a freak 'goondas burning entire house down after locking doors from outside...' accident. Brando walks in... his face drawn in tension and the confusion (refer previous paragraph for expression),he sees his dead wife, laments, cries, breast beats (not his wife's), gets a heart attack, bangs his head against Prashant and dies... all in one fluid motion. the entire sequence from Running In to Dying happening within 3 seconds. Breathtaking!!!

No one in the crowd realizes this and our man Brando plays the part of a dead man to perfection for 4 minutes while Prashant reminisces about each one of his dead sisters for 1 minutes each (you know how many sisters he has... Prolific Brando). Brando does not stir... he is wooden.. he knows when he is in limelight and he enjoys it, and you just cannot take your eyes off him. At the end of the sequence you only wonder why this Asian Brando has not occupied more screen time. It is a big loss to Kollywood.

It is all downhill from here on as far as the movie goes... once the star is gone, Prashant wants to wrap things up pretty quickly and in the next 2 hours, wears face paint, takes a couple of katanas and gets medieval on every rowdy ass in Chennai. End of story.